Tag Archives: Slow Edit

This week is my last week of editing my book before I start querying. How do I know it is ready, you might ask? The answer is: I really don’t. I read recently that a work is never really done. I agree with this statement. At some point, you just decide to stop sweating the small stuff after you’ve ready through and changed the same sentence around 6 times.

That being said, I have worked long and hard on edits for my book. I have been editing it for the last seven months! I did many stages of adding/removing/story-changing/plot-hole-filling/character-adding edits, and have most recently drudged through the dreaded Slow Edit. Now, after spending nearly 2 months on the slow edit (on a paper draft), I have to plug in all the changes. I’m halfway through the book, but this part of the process takes very little time, in comparison. I am planning to start submitting to agents next week!

Here’s the general process that I used.

Early July 2014– First Draft Finished!!!

Mid July 2014– After a week away, I did a quick read to check for any glaring issues. I ended up adding a small battle sequence that introduces an important question.

Late July 2014– I pass my book along to my beta readers, who promise to finish the book in a month’s time.

End of August 2014– One Beta reader has completed the book and given me excellent notes. I set about making the appropriate changes and decide to introduce a character who I had originally planned to introduce in Book 2, in Chapter 1 of Book 1. It makes the whole story much more exciting. Thank you Beta reader 1! Beta reader 2 didn’t finish the book.

September 2014– I continued to make the necessary edits and additions until I was happy with the content.

October 2014– It’s time for a closer look. I took another pass (rather quickly) at the whole book, but spent extra time on the first five chapters. They had always been my least favorite portion of the book, and are the most important for agents to see! After this, I printed out a copy of my book and put it in a drawer.

November 2014– I took the month off to participate in NaNoWriMo. I worked on a science fiction piece to get my mind far away from epic fantasy! (Also, Beta Reader 2 has finished only half the book and hands me notes on what is done. Unfortunately, they’re much more about word choice and grammar, and not the story.)

December 2014– Time for the dreaded slow edit. I pulled the printed copy out of the drawer and went through it: word by word, line by line. It was boring, it was grueling. But it was necessary. TYPOS ahoy!

January 2014– I finished my slow edit. Yes, I’m not proud to say that it took me almost 6 weeks to finish it! Then, I started putting any edits from the printed copy into my Microsoft Word document.

Torture at its finest, the slow edit is by far my least favorite stage of writing a book. In happier news, starting in January, I will begin querying literary agents. It’s an exciting time, but necessarily accompanied by the most grueling edit I’ve done yet: the slow edit. The slow edit only becomes necessary in the final stages before submissions. There’s no point doing one if you still have major content changes to make. However, at my current stage of development, it’s all I have left.

The slow edit is, in essence, the final edit where every single word must be studied for any typos, grammar or sentence structure problems. It’s the last time, so it becomes extra important. In the early stages, you can edit faster because you’re more focused on the story than the individual words.

Most of the literary agents that I am submitting to only want between 5 and 25 pages with the query, and some want no pages at all. Yet, I am carefully doing a slow edit on the whole book BEFORE submissions, hoping that someone will LOVE what I send them and immediately request the whole book. Because I’ve read many, many, many articles on what literary agents are looking for in a query, I know that if someone’s whole book isn’t ready when they request it, they will drop your query immediately.

Some people, like Veronica Roth, enjoy editing. I think they’re crazy. Editing is a rough heap of questions like: how did I miss that until now? And: why did I think that was a good idea? No fun, but quite necessary.